Archive

Whenever I start a blog item, I’m always faced with the words “enter title here.” It’s hard to determine whether I’m supposed to enter my title — which I have settled on “Big Kahuna, God of All He Surveys” — or whether it’s the title of the blog item. Yeah, I know it’s the latter, but in most cases, I don’t know what the title is until I’m done . . . sometimes.

Regardless, below are some observations of recent developments, like

Blame the Blocker Bugs: Fedora 13, code named Goddard, sits on the launch pad for another week as the release date is pushed back in order for the distro to fix a few more bugs. That puts the countdown back to a May 25th liftoff, according to internet.com’s Sean Michael Kerner’s article here.

That was fast: Yesterday — I think it was yesterday, although it could have just seemed like yesterday — I mournfully blogged that Mandriva was being put up for sale. Seems like a suitor has already stepped up: A report from techie-buzz.com (yeah, that got a “huh?” from me, too) here says that Lingaroa has opened its checkbook and that they have already started moving Mandriva assets.Update: Actually, that news from techie-buzz.com got a huge “non” from Paris, as the official Mandriva blog says that Mandriva “has not been bought by anybody.”

Shooting down the Air Force: When the PlayStation 3 was released, it was able to run Linux, which made creating powerful computing clusters that utilized the console’s advanced Cell processor to benefit scientific researchers. Oh, and also benefitted the Air Force, which purchased over 2,000 PS3 for that very purpose. Now that the firmware update no longer allows OtherOS (read: Linux) support, does that mean the Air Force is grounded? Not necessarily, at least as long as the 2,000 PS3s are working — and I guess the USAF is going to have to hit Craigslist.org to get replacements. Brian Leahy of shacknews.com outlines the story here.

But wait, there’s more . . . but not immediately. More to follow soon.

(Fedora ambassador Larry Cafiero runs Redwood Digital Research in Felton, California, and is an associate member of the Free Software Foundation.)